[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

"Open-wheel"? Versus "Closed-wheel"?

Technically yes, although "closed-wheel" is a term that nobody really ever uses.

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

"Purpose-built" I think I get. Built for the purpose of racing versus "stock car", I believe. A stock car is "an automobile that has not been modified from its original factory configuration" which even to this uneducated mind comes off as a crock. NASCAR cars look a bit more like my car, but that's it.

The NASCAR Chevy etc. only looks a bit like your car though. There's not a screw in that #24 Axalta Chevy that would also be found in your car. Stock cars haven't been stock in at least 50 years.

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

I looked up "rallying": Rallying is a wide-ranging form of motorsport with various competitive motoring elements such as speed tests (sometimes called "rally racing" in United States), navigation tests, or the ability to reach waypoints or a destination at a prescribed time or average speed. Rallies may be short in the form of trials at a single venue, or several thousand miles long in an extreme endurance rally."

Not sure about navigation tests and the like. This is rally racing; there's also rallycross, which pits cars directly against each other on short dirt tracks, but I know very little about either one.

In general, you still want to be fastest. Everything else sounds a bit like a novelty to me.

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

None of NASCAR, IndyCar, or Formula 1 is like that; the fastest car wins. I ran across this article that points out the difference between Rally Racing vs. Circuit Racing (which includes NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula 1, I believe). Thus Rally could have been a fourth branch of auto racing that I could have asked about, yes?

Yeah, but it's not a very big branch these days. I can't tell you all that much about it though, I never really watch any of it.

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

Heh, now a rally stock car may really resemble my car if this picture is at all typical.

Attachment 1068310

So, NASCAR is a separate beast but I am under the impression that IndyCar and Formula 1 are of the same species. I remember when I asked in the Forumula 1 thread about the Indianapolis 500, you were decidedly dismissive. Indeed, it's like PGA and LIV only that the newer Formula 1 has surpassed the older IndyCar, unlike the golf situation (yet). Agree with this assessment?

My answer was not supposed to be dismissive. From 1950 to 1960 the Indy 500 was part of the F1 world championship - for reasons that are genuinely hard to explain these days. At no point were the two series even run to the same car/engine specifications, and there was hardly any "cross-pollination" between the F1 and Indycar circuits in terms of drivers from one camp competing with the other.

Formula 1 is also far older than Indycar. F1 has been around as a championship since 1950, with a precursor in the interwar "European Championship" that was run in the 1930s. Indycar was only founded in the 1990s as a breakaway series from CART (which has since gone under); even though there has been some sort of continuity back to WW2 in the top-level of American open-wheel racing - although governing bodies (AAA, USAC...) have come and gone.

I know nothing about golf, as it bores me to absolute death, so I can't answer any PGA/LIV questions.